The hidden impact of door drops

by Neal Dodd on 20/02/2019

A fairly typical approach to door drops and advertising in
general is to run a piece of activity, including a response mechanism, then
collect together all of the responses and make a judgement about how each
channel as performed.

Does that tell you everything you need to know about how the
channel has performed? I don’t believe it does.

I wrote recently about the flaws in trying to split out response from a multi-media campaign into channel specific boxes, but the problems with simply gathering together responses applies to pretty much any business.

Why?

It’s quite likely that whatever introduces your business to
a new customer is not where the journey ends, regardless of whether you’ve
created a unique URL, phone number or discount code.

Customers simply do not behave in such a linear fashion and
whilst it’s understandable that we should want to measure the performance of
media channels, we need to consider other options than simply the responses
that were allocated a specific channel if we’re to get a good idea of whether
our advertising is working well.

One way to do that is to look at sales data as a whole in the areas where the campaign took place and here are two recent examples:

Home delivery food business

With no defined target audience, the door drop brief was for this business
is simply to cover 100% of the households in the
selected towns an area to which they
deliver cooked food.

They wished to understand how well leaflet distribution was is working for them and so we created a simple test that split the towns down the middle. Half received a leaflet, half didn’t, no bias to selections. Other media (typically radio and OOH) were constant.

Here are the results:

As you can see, there’s a clear growth in sales activity in
areas where distribution took place and at the end of the activity, sales
activity returns to similar levels for both areas yet the area covered with a
door drop is higher than the area not. This was true of all areas tested.

Direct response showed some activity but the bulk of activity came from in-app purchases.

2. Online retailer

Following household profiling activity, the brief for this
client was to identify postcode sectors in the London area with a high density
of the client’s target audience.

We created two proposals, equal in overall target
penetration and equal in households per postcode area. One proposal received
the door drop and the other was considered a control, for comparison purposes,
not receiving the door drop.

Here are the results:

The item being promoted was Christmas related and in the
week of the drop, the retailer saw 43.33% more sales from the areas receiving a
door drop vs the areas not, resulting in over £10k additional revenue. The
following two weeks posted over 25% additional sales and a further £5k per
week.

Those differences add up to 281 more orders, with no
difference in sectors other than leaflet distribution during w/c 26th
November.

Now, let’s look at direct response:

89 orders recorded as the result of the door drop item, with
customers using a code from the leaflet when purchasing.

The big question we’re left with is; what prompted the other 192 other additional customers to purchase? Where have they come from and why are these postcode sectors outperforming the control areas so dramatically?

Of course it is not quite as simple as allocating all 192 to the door drop and there will be variances within any data that you compare, but don’t you think it’s pretty telling that the areas receiving a leaflet that month produced such an increased response? Particularly as in both cases, we see sales return to similar trends several weeks after distribution.

And this is before we even consider the other effects of
door drop activity, including brand awareness.

So what does this mean?

My suggestion when reviewing door drop activity would be to
consider how you might measure the hidden impact of your activity.

If you’re using door drops as a standalone channel, are you
able to collect sales data for the period before and after the distribution to
look at overall activity before, during and after? Are you able to plan some
control areas into the distribution that won’t receive a leaflet? Are you set
up to measure indirect response through web analytics, call volumes etc?

If you’re using the distribution as part of a wider media
plan, could you ‘rest’ activity in one area and review sales data compared with
areas that did receive the leaflet. Has there been a difference in the general
response with one combination of media vs another?

How do the results of the activity compare with results
against your business objectives?

There’s no silver bullet that will solve the challenge of
attribution but customer journeys are arguably more complex than ever and so
our analysis of campaign response surely has to become a little more considered
than simply taking into account direct response.

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